CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System

CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc) is an organization representing over 120 universities in the United States and abroad, with the mission to support advanced hydrologic research and education. One of its projects is Hydrologic Information System, which develops infrastructure and services for publishing, discovering, accessing and analyzing hydrologic data from multiple sources. This multi-year project is supported by the National Science Foundation. The project is a collaboration between University of Texas – Austin (project PI is David Maidment), Utah State University, Drexel University, Idaho State University, University of South Carolina, and SDSC. SDSC is the technical partner in this project, focusing on the development of all aspects of services-based infrastructure for hydrologic observations, web services and registries, and production-level maitenance of hydrologicdatabases, catalogs and services.

The Spatial Systems Lab has developed a family of web services known as WaterOneFlow for CUAHSI. WaterOneFlow provides data access to USGS NWIS, EPA STORET, NCEP North American Model (NAM), NASA MODIS, Daymet, and NWS ASOS. Web services are computerapplications that interact with and exchange information with other applications over the internet. WaterOneFlow specifically, transfers hydrologic data between hydrologic data servers (databases) and users (computers). As part of WaterOneFlow we developed WaterML, a specific type of XML designed to transmit water data across the internet.

As part of this project, we collaborate with many government agencies and research organizations. Our federal government partnersinclude USGS, EPA, and NOAA. HIS servers are installed at several hydrologic observatory testbeds, and other organizations. We also work closely with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and with researchers from CSIRO in Australia. Our page on the OGC portal is here. A recently organized OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group is co-chaired by Ilya Zaslavsky; the DWG maintains a public wiki page.